Leveraging Social Media for More than Traffic

Social Media has become the new buzzword on the net, and follows in the footsteps of Ajax and CSS. It is an integral part of Internet Marketing’s shift away from Search Engine Optimization and towards community based promotion.

The trend of optimizing for search engines is being supported and sometimes replaced with optimization for digg, stumbleupon, and reddit. We try to shock and awe, create humor, or build knowledge while attempting to wow our readers into sharing our content. Although, the techniques may be similar, the reasons for leveraging social media sites can vary greatly and the sites we hope to star on can change based on our needs and niche.

Traffic Generation:

Few sites have the traffic potential that digg offers. It’s usually enough to crash your server if you’re not prepared. Digg receives nearly 23 million visitors monthly, blowing away the competition.

The issue with digg’s traffic is that it’s usually not targeted, unfocused, and of poor quality. Most of the visits from digg won’t convert into site readers, and most of the time you’ll see a huge spike in traffic and watch as that slowly tapers off.

Link Building:

If your campaign calls for backlinks, knowing that from them you can gain stable traffic, write for delicious. Getting featured on delicious has been known to propel sites out of the Google sandbox from the influx of links. Although, it doesn’t generate the amount of instant traffic digg does, because of the quality of the traffic it can be more valuable. Delicious offers targeted, steady traffic from the many links accrued.

Brand Visibility:

In addition to the traffic building and link generation, increasing brand visibility is a powerful way to leverage social media. By consistently getting your site out to new visitors you can build your brand. The best site to accomplish this is stumbleupon.

The site offers a huge user base, and a system that rewards content based on a few “thumbs up”. The ease of getting a decent stream of traffic makes stumbleupon the site for increasing site visibility. It can bring huge amounts of traffic, but more often than not, you’ll get a few new visitors from stumbleupon daily.

Reputation Building:

This strategy only applies to certain niches and I’ll use the Internet Marketing community as my example. Sometimes you can use social media to build your reputation as an expert in a field. Although this is looked down upon by some, it is still a powerful technique to build your popularity.

In the Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization niche, making the front page of Sphinn, continually, will build a reputation as an expert in these fields. The hard part of achieving this goal is that since Sphinn is so focused and frequented by knowledgeable users, you have to write convincing, good, articles to get to the front page. Sphinn doesn’t offer large streams of traffic, but instead gives ultra-targeted visitors and links from highly relevant sites.

Conclusion:

Leveraging Social Media isn’t synonymous with submitting to digg and stopping. It does mean tailoring your social media campaign based on the goals you want to achieve and the audience you want to reach. The only saving grace you can look forward to is that many times if a story hits big on one site it propagates to the others.

Have another creative reason for using social media? Think I’m wrong? or know a good site I left out? Leave a comment and let me know.

(image sources 1, 2, 3, 4)